In the third week of September, while Nazi troops were massing on the Czech border, Maugham left the Côte d’Azur for London, driven by Jean. Near Auxerre, south of Paris, the car hit a tree and overturned, leaving both occupants badly shaken, Maugham the worse off, very bruised and with a broken rib. Determined not to enter a hospital, he insisted on being taken to a Paris hotel, the France et Choiseul, where they knew him and where Alan came out to nurse him. “Alan has been an angel,”104 Maugham told Barbara. “For two or three days I couldn’t move in bed without help. Fortunately the surgeon who was looking after me was merciful enough to keep me under morphia.” After a couple of weeks he was well enough to complete his journey, arriving in London at the beginning of October just as reports were coming in of Hitler’s annexation of the Sudetenland. The talk everywhere was of the crisis, and of Neville Chamberlain’s triumphant return from Munich, waving his piece of paper with its declaration of “peace for our time.” On November 1, 1938, Maugham felt well enough to attend a dinner party of Sibyl Colefax’s, among his fellow guests Max Beerbohm, Virginia Woolf, and the talented young novelist Christopher Isherwood. “That young man holds the future105 of the English novel in his hands,” Maugham told Virginia. She, perhaps not knowing of his accident, was privately appalled by his appearance, “like a dead man,”106 she wrote in her diary. “And his lips are drawn back like a dead man’s … A look of suffering … A mechanical voice as if he had to raise a lever at each word … Sat like an animal in a trap: or like a steel trap. And I could not say anything that loosed his dead man’s jaw.”
In fact, while still in physical pain, Maugham was feeling more cheerful than he had for some time. During the past few years he had grown increasingly pessimistic about the likelihood of a lasting peace, a pessimism given full expression in his recently completed novel, Christmas Holiday. But now, with the signing of the Anglo-German pact confirming the two countries’ stated desire “never to go to war with one another again,” there was room for cautious hope. “Well, we’ve escaped war,107 & (I think) for many years,” Maugham wrote to Alanson. “Things should go better now at least for a bit.”
* “The Book Bag” was rejected by Ray Long for Cosmopolitan because of the shocking nature of its subject, an incestuous affair between brother and sister.
* The Hôtel Eden Roc was the inspiration for the Hôtel des Étrangers in Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
† For Maugham to retain his nonresident tax status, he could spend no more than ninety days a year in Britain.
* Greene’s novel about Haiti, The Comedians, was published in 1966.
* “An Official Position” tells the story of Louis Remire, a policeman from Lyons, who is serving a twelve-year sentence at Saint-Laurent for murdering his wife. Because of his good behavior he has been appointed the prison executioner. A brutal and conscientious man, he loves the job, but naturally is loathed by his fellow convicts, who devise a terrifying end to his career.
* The plots of “Episode,” “The Kite,” and “The Round Dozen” were all supplied by Alan.
* In his 1944 novel, The Razor’s Edge, Maugham used parts of Marie Laurencin’s story, she herself bearing marked similarities to the character of Suzanne Rouvier.
† “People complain that my portraits are not a good likeness. I can’t tell you how little I care.”
‡ “I must have been replaced by another snobbery.”
* The novel was dramatized in 1941 and has been filmed twice: in 1962, with Charles Boyer and Lilli Palmer, and in 2004, as Being Julia, with Annette Bening and Jeremy Irons.
* A writers’ society founded in 1921 to promote literature.
* The word “luncheon” was something of a stumbling block between Marsh and Maugham. “Whenever I wrote lunch, he changed it to luncheon. I protested that the word was obsolete…. It was natural to say, I urged, ‘Will you come and have lunch with me,’ and so why shouldn’t you use it in a book. ‘But it isn’t natural to me,’ Eddie cried in his shrill voice, ‘I won’t come and have lunch with you. I will, however, if I am disengaged be pleased to come and have luncheon with you’” (Eddie Marsh: Sketches for a Composite Literary Portrait, compiled by Christopher Hassall and Denis Mathews [Lund Humphries, 1953]).
* The British Raj, or Indian Empire, was divided into two regions: British India, which was administered directly by the British government, and the Princely or Native States, governed by individual rulers under the paramountcy of the British Crown.
* “The world is illusory, judged from the standpoint of Reality, but it is not an illusion. It is a fact of consciousness,” Maugham explains. “The wise men of India are fond of using the following illustration: you see on a dark night what you take to be a snake and you run away from it; but when a light is brought, you see that what you took for a snake is in fact a rope. It was an illusion that what you saw was a snake, but it was a rope….” (Points of View).
CHAPTER 14
AN EXERCISE IN PROPAGANDA
• • •
MAUGHAM ALWAYS CLAIMED NOT TO CARE FOR THE NOVEL OF ideas, the novel as polemic. “I think it an abuse1 to use the novel as a pulpit or a platform,” he stated more than once. Yet in his new work of fiction he comes very near to doing exactly this. Christmas Holiday, written during 1938, is constructed primarily to carry a message, an impassioned denunciation of the malevolent forces developing within Europe, of the powerful dictatorships in Germany, Italy, and Spain. Since the beginning of the decade Maugham had been pessimistic about the possibility of maintaining a viable peace, as he had made plain six years earlier in For Services Rendered. Since then he had watched with acute apprehension the increasingly bitter conflict between left and right—the rise of Fascism, the widening divisions between rich and poor—and the terrifying threat that they presented, a threat that in his opinion blinkered Britain appeared dangerously slow to understand.
Christmas Holiday follows the disillusionment of Charley Mason, a naïve young Englishman come to Paris to enjoy a short holiday with Simon, his childhood best friend. But the Paris he finds himself in is a shabby, uneasy city, rank with poverty and corruption, and Simon is almost unrecognizable, transformed into a raging, power-hungry fanatic, a dictator in the making. During the next few days Simon brutally sets out to destroy Charley’s innocence, to warp his instinctive tolerance and mildly socialist values. And thus when he finally returns to England, Charley feels he has been living in a nightmare, but one that “had a fearful reality2 which rendered all else illusory…. Only one thing had happened to him … the bottom had fallen out of his world.”
Christmas Holiday is first and foremost a political allegory, in which the author employs his characters to illustrate the ideological struggles in Europe, using them to personify the nature of Fascism and the totalitarian states, and the fatal malleability of the oppressed. Unfortunately, they are all, with the exception of Charley, two-dimensional, and the lengthy relating of their various stories at secondhand grows monotonous. The only human aspect of Simon, carefully left unexplored by the author, is a strong impression that he is and always has been hopelessly in love with handsome, heterosexual Charley (thus refuting Gore Vidal’s assertion that The Narrow Corner is Maugham’s only “crypto-fag” novel). Ironically, the few scenes that at once spring vividly to life are those concerning Charley and his comically complacent family back home in London. The Masons are a little too pleased with themselves, but they are decent, tolerant people, their chief failing, in common with most of the rest of the country, a refusal to take seriously the threat of the imminent destruction of their comfortable way of life.
IN FEBRUARY 1939, when Christmas Holiday was published, Maugham was on business in the United States (where the novel appeared in October). As before, he was inundated with requests to broadcast—he was paid $500 for one two-minute radio talk—for interviews, articles, and short stories, and with the usual pressing offers from Hollywood. “I am now advised3 that Maugham will not, under any circum
stances, consider a picture assignment,” wrote the producer David O. Selznick. “There is no indication that he may change his mind in the future.” By the time he returned to Europe, sailing from New York on the Queen Mary, Maugham was exhausted, eager for his annual restorative retreat. As there was no question at the present of visiting Austria and Badgastein, the spa at Montecatini was chosen instead. “Here in Italy everyone seems convinced4 that there will be no war,” he wrote to Alanson in June, “so unless the Germans do something idiotic I think we are safe.”
Back at the Villa Mauresque by July, Maugham saw no reason to alter his plans or to cancel his guests for the summer, among them Liza and her husband with a group of young friends. It was a particularly gay season on the Riviera, with a plethora of plays, open-air concerts, horse shows, fireworks, balls, and, keenly anticipated, the inauguration of the first-ever Cannes Film Festival, due to open on September 1. But by the beginning of August it was ominously apparent that no such festivity would be taking place. On August 23, with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Declaration, the atmosphere grew darker and more tense: all at once soldiers were everywhere, their tented camps erected among the trees; Cap Ferrat was converted into a highly fortified military zone, with machine gun emplacements installed along the cliffs and an antiaircraft battery at one end of the road that ran below the Mauresque. Suddenly everyone seemed to be on the move, with holidaymakers rushing to return home—there was not a place to be had on the Blue Train—and the roads jammed with traffic as heavily laden cars and trucks full of troops heading north met hordes of refugees fleeing south. Within one 24-hour period during the last week in August the Mauresque was virtually evacuated, the guests suddenly packed and gone and most of the servants departed: the kitchen maid, the footman, and his wife, all Italian, returned to Italy; Jean the chauffeur was called up, as were a couple of gardeners, while the butler, Ernest, a Swiss, was recalled to Switzerland; only Annette, the cook, and a housemaid, Nina, remained in the house. At the same time an order was posted that all private yachts must immediately leave the harbor at Villefranche. With the decision to move forced upon them, Maugham made up his mind to take the Sara west to Cassis, a port too small to be of interest to the navy. He and Gerald drove hurriedly into Nice to stock up on provisions, and with these stowed on board they set sail, taking with them as crew a couple of Italian boatmen too old for conscription.
The weather was perfect, and at first, Maugham recalled, “there was a feeling of gentle excitement5 at the notion of getting away from the danger zone … I read and slept and smoked … enjoying the quiet after those harassing days”; the Stars and Stripes floating from the stern ensured the boat’s safety. With coastal waters heavily mined, they were obliged to navigate a circuitous route, and by the third day they had sailed only as far as Bandol, a pretty fishing village halfway between Toulon and Marseilles; as there seemed little point in going farther, here they resolved to stay until the furor had died down and it was safe to return. At Bandol a routine was quickly established, with Maugham every morning rising early to go ashore and visit the market, an experience entirely new to him:
Maugham on the terrace with Winston Churchill and H. G. Wells.
Henry James, criticized by Maugham for his “triviality of soul.”
Edith Wharton, “magnificently condescending.”
Virginia Woolf gave Maugham one of his earliest reviews.
Maugham shopping in Macy’s.
Robin Maugham, well mannered and eager to please.
Maugham surrounded by admirers on Cape Cod.
The writer Glenway Wescott had much in common with Maugham.
Beverley Nichols, a young man on the make.
The elegant Barbara Back, witty and indiscreet.
Maugham with G. B. Stern, a cheerful presence at the Mauresque.
Alan Searle, the Bronzino boy.
Maugham with (clockwise from left) Dadie Rylands, Raymond Mortimer, Paul Hyslop, Gerald Haxton, Barbara Back, and Arthur Marshall (front).
By the pool: (left to right) Gerald, Raymond Mortimer, Maugham, Paul Hyslop, and Godfrey Winn.
Breakfast in bed at the Mauresque.
Liza with her father and Bert Alanson in California.
Ellen and Nelson Doubleday with Maugham at Bonny Hall.
Haxton and Maugham riding with friends in South Carolina.
Fishing on the Combahee River.
A slightly tense evening on the Riviera: Searle (back view), Liza, Maugham, and Camilla.
Bridge, “the most entertaining game that the art of man has devised.”
Alan, the perfect nanny of Maugham’s second childhood.
Robin was very attentive to his aged uncle.
I bought chickens with trepidation because I could never tell if that dead, featherless creature was young and tender or old and tough; I tried to pretend I knew what I was doing by poking a timid finger into its breast but the cold and clammy skin gave me goose flesh.
Writing, “the most enthralling of human activities.”
As the days passed, news of the international situation grew increasingly grim, with the invasion of Poland on September 1, France officially mobilized on the second, and on the third, Britain and France declaring war on Germany. With little to do, time moved slowly; the fine weather turned cold and cloudy, and Maugham grew restless, anxious to return home and discover whether any reply had arrived to the letter he had sent the Ministry of Information offering his services. With his country prepared for war, Maugham once again was eager to participate. “I am hoping [to] get some sort of work6 in the department I was in during the last war,” he confided to Desmond MacCarthy on the Sara’s elegant writing paper (canary yellow, with the name of the yacht in dark blue).
It may be that the authorities will think me useless: in that case I don’t quite know what I shall do…. I have four novels in my head that I should like to write before I finish & if I can do nothing else I suppose the sensible thing would be to sit down & write them, but at present I am too distraught to give them a thought; I spend my time devouring such papers as I can get hold of & turning on the radio whenever there is news.
Finally, after nearly a month away, he and Gerald decided to decamp, abandoning the boat at Bandol and ignoring the stringent restrictions recently imposed on movement between one département and another. Brazenly the two of them climbed into a taxi and ordered the astonished driver to take them to Cap Ferrat, a journey that, miraculously, they completed without a hitch.
Arriving unannounced, they found the house shuttered and airless, and apart from the obvious comforts of being at home, the atmosphere was melancholy. “I much fear that I shall be left7 to twiddle my thumbs indefinitely,” Maugham wrote to his nephew, while Gerald told Robin, “Willie and I are … feeling very aged8 and on the shelf—nobody seems to want our services. He is very low and gloomy about it.” Then finally a message came through from the Ministry with a definite offer of work. “This raised my spirits,”9 said Maugham, “for it looked as though I were at last going to be given something to do.”
In 1939 the Ministry of Information was in a state of some confusion, vaguely aware that well-known writers should be useful but unsure exactly how to deploy them, much time being wasted in the forming and dissolving of committees and the sending out of impractical statements of intent. Yet amid the muddle, the almost unique usefulness of Somerset Maugham in respect of Anglo-French relations had been noted: not only had the man lived in France for over a decade, but he was widely known there and held in high regard—as recently as August 1939 he had been raised to the rank of Commandeur of the Légion d’Honneur—and consequently would have access to people and information available to few outsiders. Thus he was asked, first, if he would compile a private report for the Ministry on the attitude of the French toward their British allies, and second, if he would write a series of articles to be published in Britain extolling France and the French war effort.
Immediately galvanized,
Maugham packed his bags and left for Paris. Here he made arrangements for visiting the front, paying calls on Jean Giraudoux, dramatist and diplomat, currently head of the Bureau of Information, and Raoul Dautry, minister for armaments, who provided him with the necessary introductions and laissez-passer. It was from these highly placed contacts, too, that he gleaned such information as might be discreetly transmitted to London, “private reports,”10 as he termed them, “upon such matters as it behoved the government to be informed.” Much of this information was gathered when he dined out in the evening after his day’s work was done, and frequently he came away appalled by the pro-German sentiments he heard expressed. Many of the more prosperous sections of society had loathed Léon Blum and his socialist government and were terrified by the threat of Communism, openly admitting that they believed they would do better under German domination. Patriotism was regarded as a notion a civilized man should have outgrown. “What difference will it make11 to us if Hitler does conquer France?” they asked. “We shan’t be any worse off.” Others were more circumspect and took care what they said in front of the quiet, well-mannered Englishman with the dark, watchful eyes. The vehemently pro-Fascist Horace de Carbuccia, Maugham’s Riviera neighbor, was one who had a shrewd idea what his old friend was up to. “Méfiez-vous de cet Anglais,”12 he claimed to have been warned. “Il est de l’Intelligence Service…. Soyez assuré que s’il tire de vous un renseignement de quelque intérêt, le deuxième étage de Downing Street en sera informé le lendemain.”*
The Secret Lives of Somerset Maugham Page 49